CareClub - Making Charity Effortless

CareClub was designed to give people the opportunity to connect with causes they are passionate about through an integrated, e-commerce experience.

Team 1 , Benjamin Heller , Catherine Kolski , Changtian (Devin) Ma , Jordi Nonay Jordi
2021-05-02

Problem Statement

Online donations account for over 50% of all charitable donations, but there are many inefficiencies that complicate a donor’s decision to donate — inconvenience of payment processing and lack of transparency or choice of charities — which lead to potential donors who “want to give, but find it difficult to do so.”

“Only 38% of donors who made an online gift to a nonprofit in 2016 made an online gift again to that nonprofit in 2017” (Source: doublethedonation.com)

Therefore, the decision inefficiency is leaving monetary donations on the table. These donations could have effectively helped contribute to any number of valuable causes, so we want to provide a solution where users who shop online (retail, food delivery, or other services) can customize their own donation preferences at already implemented check out processes.

User Personas

Persona 1 - B2B Retailer

Persona 2 - College Student

Persona 3 - Consumer Retailer

Conversation Starters

  1. Where do you mostly shop (clothes, groceries or other)? In store or online?

  2. How often do you donate to charity? Are you or have you been involved with charities or nonprofits?

  3. Are you part of a rewards program with your favorite retailer? If so, what are the benefits of the program (free shipping, points, etc)?

  4. Tell me about a time when something prevented you from giving more or being charitable.

  5. What are the main problems or barriers/frictions you face when trying to be charitable? Money (economic security)? Time-consuming, effortful process? Lack of information or options regarding causes or charities? Are they the same factors that discourage saving (dislike present losses)?

User Interviews

Joan: VP of Merchandising at a B2B Retail Company, Perry Ellis International

Rishu: College Student at University of Pennsylvania

Lesley: President of the Cashmere Sale (a division of Republic Clothing Apparel)

Learnings from the User Interviews

Learning 1

Learning 2

Learning 3

Storyboarding a Solution

1) The Traditional Online Shopping Experience

2) Download Chrome Extension

Our proposed solution is a chrome extension that automates the donation process (when available at online retailers) by attempting to leverage social norms, setting a good default, and appealing to cognitive ease.

Throughout the semester, we have tried to get a comprehensive understanding of the frictions and motivations for giving. The rewards feature attempts to maximize “warm glow giving”, the economic theory that describes how people’s charitable contributions are largely driven by the selfish pleasure they receive from giving and “doing good”. Further, the latest research by John List has highlighted the “relative importance of benefits to self as a driver of giving” (https://www.nber.org/papers/w26559). A statewide field experiment, undertaken in partnership with Alaska’s Pick.Click.Give Charitable Contributions Program, found that individuals who received an appeal to self (“Warm Your Heart”) were 4.5% more likely to donate and contributed 20% more than the control group.

3) One Time Setup

More specifically, we envision that the tool may suggest causes, and potentially charities, based on key impact metrics rather than simply by popularity or size. This particular feature would further appeal to the users who may have considered doing the thorough research and screening process independently to find the causes they care about and feel most attached to the measurable impact that their contribution will have.

4) Donation Opportunity

The message displayed with the donation opportunity is yet another reminder of how good it feels to give and uses the findings of the “Warm Your Heart” experiment.

We opted for keeping a confirmation stage in the automation process following user feedback on the storyboards.

5) Donation Summary

6) Donation Feed

The social aspect of donating can be missed in an online setting and this social feed (inspired by Venmo) is an alternative to incorporate that. Here, our solution aims to use social norms. Research shows that individuals assess what the majority has done and attempts to behave in a manner that is fair or similar (https://directory.uleth.ca/users/debra.basil). Additionally, people who are indifferent about contributions react most strongly to information about others’ behavior and their contributions increase, on average, if they know that many others contribute (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/0002828043052187). Displaying the names of the people and friends who have donated as well as providing an integration with social media sets up this environment.

7) Rewarding Donations (value creation)

Next Steps

Our project aims to make people feel more informed about their donations while doing the “most good” (effective altruism) with the least effort. We want people to feel good about being able to donate when and how they want, to the causes that they care most about.

To fulfill such goals we envision exploring an extension that will learn to understand the user, possibly by using Google and CareClub member data. Our solution could provide recommendations and suggest retailers that offer donation programs that better match the users’ desired causes. In addition, we could test a recommendation system that would prompt returning users to raise their donation commitments leveraging the “foot-in-the-door effect” and “Give More Tomorrow” findings pioneered by Richard Thaler. We also recognize that we have to make sure to build incentives for people to sign up for CareClub in the first place. This requires utilizing marketing tools on many different platforms, and also considering other incentives such as telling people we will donate a certain amount of money if they sign up.

Ultimately, the immediate next step would be to quickly deploy an MVP with the goal of maximizing the amount of feedback acquired from target users about the potential of our product idea. This will let us know if our solution solves their problem and provide a base on which to iterate. We have began designing the first prototype which is previewed below.